Do you believe that some languages are spoken
more quickly than others? 92% of the students I have surveyed so far have
answered “yes”.
Every now and then we can hear remarks about a
language that is purportedly spoken extremely fast, machine gunning words at you.
Spanish, for example, is notorious for its unintelligibly elevated speed
amongts many foreigners. There have been many attempts at
providing scientific evidence to support this claim, yet none of them have been
entirely conclusive. Or, in other words, as with any other language myth,
reality is just not so simple.
According to Peter Roach (1998), there might be
three possibilities when answering the question: ARE SOME LANGUAGES SPOKEN
FASTER?
- It is true as a result of the way sounds are articulated;
- It is an impression or illusion;
- Some societies prefer to speak slowly while others - quickly.
But before even venturing an answer to question
1, it has to be determined what speed in language production really means. Thus
it must be decided whether we measure the number of words, syllables or sounds
in a period of time and other elements of spoken language such as pauses and
hesitations cannot be neglected either. When it comes to words, a series of
problems arise: isa long German word the same as a short English one? Syllables,
one the other hand, are problematic due to different syllable structures
amongts languages (“strength” is one syllable in English, but its complexity is
much greater than that of “it”, for example). It looks like it’s the number of
sounds that should be targeted, yet even so, some sounds can be left out in
quick speech. What is most important, though, seems to be the fact that no
studies have proven significant differences in sound-per-second production according to Roach (1998). Questions 2 and 3 will
be left unaddressed here because of their little interest at this point and I
know of no clear answer to them.
Instead, let's focus on a fairly recent
study by Pellegrini (2011) (it was actually all around the press). The paper shed
some light on the matter by comparing the number of syllables produced by
speakers of 7 different languages (Mandarin, Japanese, French, German, English,
Spanish, Italian). It turned out that indeed, some languages produced more
syllables per second than others but where syllables were pronouned more
quickly, their informative load was smaller. (For more details, glance at this this infographic or at the full text of the article).
In very simple terms: you can imagine that “calm”
and “tranquilo” are respectively 1 and 3 syllables long and mean the same
thing. “Calm”, then, is semantically more significant (“dense”) than “tra-“, for
example. You need 3 syllables in Spanish
where English has 1. So Spanish conveys less information per syllable and so
Spanish speakers have to hurry as they speak.
Based on this, the headline question ought to
be answered affirmatively: Spanish indeed is spoken faster than English (7.82
vs 6.19 syllables/second), yet the semantic density of a syllable is 0.63 for
Spanish and 0.91 for English (the value 1.0 was established for Vietnamese as a
language where virtually every syllable is believed to have an individual meaning).
Moreover, a supplementary hypothesis was formulated that the repeating pattern might be related to human cognition and that the amount of
information processed/expressed per minute was the same (statistically
speaking) all around the globe.
All in all, in the end there is a grain of
truth to that. The bottom line is: the same story is told in the same amount of
time. So people who speak “faster” do not convey more information than
slow-talkers. Or do they?
References:
Pellegrino, F., Ch. Coupé and E.
Marsico (2011). A cross-language perspective
on speech information rate. Language in Language. Volume 87, Number 3, September 2011. pp. 539-558. (here)
Roach. P. (1998). “Some Languages are Spoken More Quickly Than Others”
in L. Bauer
and P. Trudgill (eds). Language Myths. London: Penguin. 150-8
